The folks at the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America
helped get this bill passed, a big deal since it addresses IAVA's key
recommendations for female veterans and caregivers of severely disabled
veterans.

Zen is the art of doing things in the unconscious, Winston L. King writes in his book, Zen and the Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche. Doing without thinking. Internalizing knowing as close as can be got to the core of one’s being. This is Sgt. James, taking off the safety suit with eyes and mind and all of his being for the ordnance only and with total disregard to his own safety. He is Master Chief. He is Zen Man.

Mr. Hudson's idea sounds remarkably simple —
create and use standardized medical questionnaires for private
physicians to fill out when they treat veterans to speed up the process
for evaluating VA disability claims. Currently, veterans must undergo a
further exam at a VA medical facility to get information on their
conditions and degrees of disability.

OK,
the deal is that former and current service members can get back pay,
if they were involuntarily extended on active duty because of surprise
stop-loss clauses from Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 30, 2008.

(The Obama administration made this happen; the prior administration didn't want to pay the troops.)

History was made when the nation’s top uniformed officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee
that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military.
We must get rid of today’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, said Mullen, because
it’s simply “the right thing to do.”

Well, it’s about time. It was a mistake on Bill Clinton’s part to adopt that
policy in the first place, way back in 1993. My only questions are: What took
them so long to get this far? And now that the Pentagon recognizes that getting
rid of the old Clinton policy is the right thing to do, why’s it going to take
so long to change it?

Maybe popular thinking is wrong. It's entirely possible that when President Barack Obama advocated doing away with "Don't ask, don't tell” the other night, the Joint Chiefs of Staff generals were not being stoic, they were stunned — too panicked to move. It wasn't military bearing, it was fear.

Why? It's not as if the president was proposing that the services' chaplain be required to perform gay marriages, simply that we get real about the present policy about the non-straight orientation in our armed forces, which is basically "If you got it, don’t flaunt it.”